A .notdef glyph in oil

[William Overington]

 

 

 

The image was produced using the second brush in the list of brushes labelled 'oils' in Affinity Designer.

William

 

[Alfred]

Not the most widely recognized/recognizable .notdef glyph in the world, if I may say so!

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/opentype/spec/recom#glyph-0-the-notdef-glyph

[William Overington]

47 minutes ago, Alfred said:

Not the most widely recognized/recognizable .notdef glyph in the world, if I may say so!

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/opentype/spec/recom#glyph-0-the-notdef-glyph

You may indeed say so. 😀

It depends what you mean by recognizable.

Do you mean, seeing the glyph on its own, would people recognize it as being a .notdef glyph?

Do you mean (perhaps of the precisely drawn filled design upon which the oil drawing is based) that seeing it displayed amongst a page of text in a draft document in Affinity Publisher, would people recognize it being there (as in 'they notice it rather than not notice it') as contrasted with perhaps not noticing an unfilled rectangle?

You may also, if you so choose, search for .notdef and my name and see what you find.

I was trying brushes and drew that design, though the aspect ratio should be square.

William

 

 

[Mark Ingram]

From Alfred's link:

Quote

It is recommended that the shape of the .notdef glyph be either an empty rectangle, a rectangle with a question mark inside of it, or a rectangle with an “X”. Creative shapes, like swirls or other symbols, may not be recognized by users as indicating that a glyph is missing from the font and is not being displayed at that location.

 

[Alfred]

1 hour ago, William Overington said:

I was trying brushes and drew that design, though the aspect ratio should be square.

I think you mean the aspect ratio should be like that of a square; i.e. 1:1. So why isn’t it?

[William Overington]

Now that is a really nice picture.

Thank you.

Is it the same brush and colour that I used?

I said which brush I had used, the colour was just one from the standard Affinity Colours palette.

I am not sure how I could get the same colour again even having the .afdesign file available.

Thinking about it, did you draw that freehand or did you set it up using the Pen Tool and the Transform panel then texture it with the brush afterwards?

William

 

[William Overington]

This picture uses the fifth oil brush of Affinity Designer.

William

 

 

[Alfred]

49 minutes ago, William Overington said:

Now that is a really nice picture.

Thank you.

Thank you, William.

49 minutes ago, William Overington said:

Is it the same brush and colour that I used?

I said which brush I had used, the colour was just one from the standard Affinity Colours palette.

You said that you used the second brush in the Oils category, so I did the same. It’s identified in the Brushes panel as ‘Dense Oil Impasto 02’. I originally used a light green, but amended it when I noticed that it needed to be slightly blue to approximate the colour that you used, so I ended up with RGB #00FF7F.

50 minutes ago, William Overington said:

I am not sure how I could get the same colour again even having the .afdesign file available.

Choose the Move Tool and select the brush stroke, either on the canvas or in the Layers panel. The Colour panel will reveal the values of the colour components for the currently selected object.

53 minutes ago, William Overington said:

Thinking about it, did you draw that freehand or did you set it up using the Pen Tool and the Transform panel then texture it with the brush afterwards?

I couldn’t possibly draw such a smooth curve freehand! Instead of using the Pen Tool, I simply drew a quarter circle with the Pie Tool and subtracted a square from the bottom right-hand corner. That gave me a shape whose stroke was the wrong way around (denser on the outside than the inside) so I reversed the curve via the Node Tool’s ‘Reverse’ option. I also broke the curve at the bottom left-hand corner to get the gap in the correct place.

4 minutes ago, William Overington said:

This picture uses the fifth oil brush of Affinity Designer.

William

Very nicely done! I can see you didn’t do that one freehand!!

[William Overington]

Thank you, Alfred.

I used the Frame Text Tool and my Quest text font.

https://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/QUESTTXT.TTF

I needed a character not in the font so as to get the .notdef glyph to display.

I did

Alt 60000

in WordPad, then copied it across to the text frame in Affinity Designer, in fact, by first having put a few ordinary characters in the text frame and in WordPad having ordinary characters each side of the Alt 60000 character.

Then I copied from WordPad to Affinity Designer, deleted the extra characters and so got the .notdef glyph in Quest text and enlarged it by increasing the point size.

Some or all of the exra characters may not have been necessary, but I often do things that way, it seems to avoid problems sometimes.

I then converted the glyph tp curves, then I applied the oil brush effect, though in fact trying various brushes to decide which one I thought gave the best result.

Did you look up the story of how the design of the .notdef glyph originated in 2002? 

William

 

[Alfred]

29 minutes ago, William Overington said:

I needed a character not in the font so as to get the .notdef glyph to display.

I did

Alt 60000

in WordPad, then copied it across to the text frame in Affinity Designer, in fact, by first having put a few ordinary characters in the text frame and in WordPad having ordinary characters each side of the Alt 60000 character.

Then I copied from WordPad to Affinity Designer, deleted the extra characters and so got the .notdef glyph in Quest text and enlarged it by increasing the point size.

You could have used a ‘G+’ or ‘U+’ sequence directly within Affinity Designer.

Affinity Designer Help: Special characters and glyphs

Quote

Did you look up the story of how the design of the .notdef glyph originated in 2002?

No, or at least not recently!

[William Overington]

11 hours ago, Alfred said:

No, or at least not recently!

It is an interesting story. I may not have thought to design a .notdef glyph otherwise.

I have used this glyph design, and variants of it in many of the fonts that I have prodiced.

William

 

[William Overington]

While looking through a page that includes some of my fonts, at

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/fonts.htm

I ckecked which design I had used for the .notdef glyph for some of them.

William

 

[Alfred]

On 5/5/2022 at 7:53 PM, Alfred said:

A few more colour options:

 

[William Overington]

Wow! Impressive.

Today I am seeking an online interview with the artist to try to find more about this artwork and how it was produced.

I seek to ask the artist the following questions.

The artwork has four distinct areas, each with twenty glyphs. How did you arrive at that choice please?

The image is almost square as to number of pixels. Would a larger version,exported from the original Affnity Designer artwork produce a good image, or does the application of the brush effect mean that a larger version would have chunky granularity of the colourful areas?

How did you colour those eighty glyphs please? Did you colour each one by hand or did you use an automated process of some kind?

How did you choose the particular colours? For example, many of the colours in the upper right quadrant are more intense than many of the colours used elsewhere?

Thank you for agreeing to the interview.

William

 

 

[Alfred]

On 5/5/2022 at 6:56 PM, Mark Ingram said:

From Alfred's link:

Quote

It is recommended that the shape of the .notdef glyph be either an empty rectangle, a rectangle with a question mark inside of it, or a rectangle with an “X”. Creative shapes, like swirls or other symbols, may not be recognized by users as indicating that a glyph is missing from the font and is not being displayed at that location.

 

Please see: https://unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2002-m08/0005.html

Quote

Printed manuals can handle unrendered characters quite easily. The manual can use one arbitrarily chosen appearance (such as U+25AF or U+2337) for unrendered characters, with a note (on first occurrence) that the screen appearance of unrendered characters may vary - screenshots can be given as examples.

For those wondering, U+25AF is ‘White Vertical Rectangle’ and U+2337 is ‘APL Functional Symbol Squish Quad’.

[Alfred]

34 minutes ago, William Overington said:

Wow! Impressive.

Thank you.

34 minutes ago, William Overington said:

Today I am seeking an online interview with the artist to try to find more about this artwork and how it was produced.

LOL.

34 minutes ago, William Overington said:

The artwork has four distinct areas, each with twenty glyphs. How did you arrive at that choice please?

It’s actually only two distinct areas, each with forty glyphs. I wanted to be able to use the eighty colours in the palette supplied with the Crayon Box from @Frankentoon Studio, but since the iPad apps currently lack a palette import feature I used the screenshot of the Swatches panel in the ‘Quickstart’ guide as the basis of creating a new palette within the apps. I applied each of the colours to a glyph on one of two artboards in Affinity Designer, and then used those artboards to produce the image that I attached to my earlier post. (There are five swatches per row in the Swatches Studio in AD on iPad, which is why there are five swatches per row on each artboard.)

34 minutes ago, William Overington said:

The image is almost square as to number of pixels. Would a larger version,exported from the original Affnity Designer artwork produce a good image, or does the application of the brush effect mean that a larger version would have chunky granularity of the colourful areas?

The image should have been exactly square, and I’m not sure why it isn’t! Anyway, here’s a larger version of one of the glyphs:

[Alfred]

36 minutes ago, William Overington said:

How did you colour those eighty glyphs please? Did you colour each one by hand or did you use an automated process of some kind?

I used the palette that I described in my previous post.

37 minutes ago, William Overington said:

How did you choose the particular colours? For example, many of the colours in the upper right quadrant are more intense than many of the colours used elsewhere?

As noted in the above post, the colours were chosen by creator of the Crayon Box.

39 minutes ago, William Overington said:

Thank you for agreeing to the interview.

You’re welcome. Thank you for the invitation.

[William Overington]

15 hours ago, Alfred said:

A few more colour options:

 

Noting that that image is square, I thought that that pattern would be good on wall tiles.

I looked at

https://viking-virtualprinthouse.co.uk/

and found that one can print loose sheets of square pieces of paper, with the white paper going up to 350 grammes per square metre.

Custom ceramic tiles might be available from some other supplier, but card ones could be good, used as if wallpaper on part of a wall, though best not in a kitchen or bathroom..

William

 

[Alfred]

38 minutes ago, William Overington said:

Custom ceramic tiles might be available from some other supplier, but card ones could be good, used as if wallpaper on part of a wall, though best not in a kitchen or bathroom.

You could laminate the piece of card, or you could spray on a fixative varnish.